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Leaping Ahead With XML Using XPS
- 2001 Jul 01 The eXtensible Programming Script (XPS) brings to you an active processor of XML, combining the dynamic flexibility of a scripting language and the powers of XML data processing to help you leap ahead in your electronic business transactions. XML has been helping various companies systematise their business operations in various ways since its introduction in 1998. The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has endorsed the XML version 1.0 as a recommendation standard by the international consortium. Many more XML-related standards and technologies have since been developed. Recommended standards such as XPath used for referencing XML data fields, and XSLT used primarily for transforming XML data records and documents have provided good starting grounds for a pervasive use of XML in data processing and businesses.
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XPS complements XPath and XSLT to give XML users a greater
amount of flexibility in molding their XML and even non-XML
data such as text and binary files to and from XML sources.
In other words, with XPS, you can connect up proprietary
data output format from your legacy systems and translate them
into outgoing XML format for your customers or suppliers.
Conversely, when you receive XML formatted orders or
invoices from your customers or suppliers, you can also
do the reverse by using XPS to "digest" the incoming
XML documents and subsequently output them into proprietary
text or binary format.
If the word "binary" makes you think of the need of complicated and expensive software development tools, worry not. XPS is designed to run in a compact fashion to take advantage of low-cost computers that may be sitting at one corner of your office. Being a scripting language, XPS also does not need the often tedious task of keeping maintenance of different versions of source codes suites and executables, as the script itself is the executable.
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